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Leamington pot company grows ‘quick as lightning’

Vegetable grower Double Diamond Farms was putting final touches on a 30-acre greenhouse expansion north of Leamington’s downtown.

But instead of tomatoes or peppers, the $40-million state-of-the-art facility will now be refitted to grow Canada’s most promising new agricultural product — pot.

Double Diamond has teamed with Leamington’s Aphria Inc., one of Canada’s biggest growers of medical marijuana. The new firm, GrowCo, is 51-per-cent owned by Aphria, which provides the refit capital and know-how, while Double Diamond, which owns the other 49 per cent, “provides the talent and the labour,” said Aphria chief executive Vic Neufeld.

With more than $1 billion in expansion investment this month alone, Aphria is looking beyond the local landscape to national and international potential.

On the heels of the biggest takeover in Canada’s burgeoning cannabis sector by one of its chief competitors, Aphria announced Monday a major acquisition of its own — the $826-million purchase of global pot retailer Nuuvera.

And last week came news of Aphria’s $230-million purchase of licensed producer Broken Coast Cannabis Inc. in B.C., with its strong ties to the medical marijuana market on the west coast.

“It’s as quick as lightning — if you don’t act, someone else will,” Neufeld said of his company’s fast growth curve.

Aphria was already in the midst of implementing its own rapid-expansion schedule, but Neufeld said partnering with Double Diamond and getting a ready-built greenhouse campus could shave up to 18 months off that timeline.

GrowCo’s 1.3-million square feet in greenhouse growing space means capacity for about 120,000 kilograms of cannabis per year. The expansion work currently underway at Aphria’s existing campus on Talbot Road west of the downtown is expected to give the company a million square feet of indoor growing space by August, capable of annual harvests of 100,000 kilograms of cannabis, said Neufeld.